Friday, February 19, 2016

Desperation breeds desperation on ISIS

While the American media is drowning in its own
self-indulgent addiction to the campaign rhetoric in their presidential race,
Reuters and several other international media have reported the fact that in
southern Iraq, near the city of Basra, some nuclear material, contained in a
box the size of a laptop, was stolen in November, as well as a camera
containing radioactive material (the I-192 isotope). Reports note that the
location of the theft is some 500 kilometers from the nearest Daesh encampment,
in a vain attempt to minimize the risk that the Islamic terrorists might have
the material.* Really? We all know that, should ISIS ever gain possession of
such material, they would consider such a “find” nothing short of the brass
ring. Even if they were not able to generate a nuclear weapon from the use of
such material, they could detonate a dirty bomb that would poison an area, once
again inflicting their devastation almost without a fingerprint of evidence.

Listening to Secretary of Defence, Ashton Carter,
being interviewed by Charlie Rose Wednesday night this week on Bloomberg, I was
struck by his repetition of the notion, “ISIS will be defeated, we will defeat
ISIS....and the President has always agreed whenever we have asked for more
resources in that fight....and the President has told us to look for additional
opportunities to fight ISIS....and we are all committed to the early defeat of
ISIS”....His pleas were a virtual prayer of desperation as he attempts to
preside over the United States’ leadership of the coalition whose avowed
purpose is to destroy the “cancer” that Carter says starts in Iraq and Syria.
However, we also all know, that just like every other cancer tumor, even the
most dedicated oncology surgeon, oncology radiologist and oncology treatment
specialist and researcher is never able to predict the complete elimination of
the disease, unless and until tests many years after treatment demonstrate such
a finding. Carter is in the unfortunate and even unenviable position of being
caught in a political time warp, selling the campaign to eradicate ISIS in the
last year of the Obama presidency, when, as Carter admitted to Rose, Obama
wants to leave the slate clear of ISIS in Iraq and Syria for his successor as
an important aspect of his legacy.

“Did the Paris attack change the environment for the
campaign against ISIS?” asked Rose.

Well, it certainly aroused the Europeans who are now
committing additional resources to the fight against ISIS. Even Saudi Arabia
and the United Arab Emirates are contributing to the fight. All members of the
coalition have increased their contribution and participation in the fight
against ISIS...was Carter’s response.

Of course, the story of the stolen nuclear material
had not broken Wednesday, prior to the Rose interview. In fact, it has not
broken, having been suppressed since it actually occurred in November of 2015.
What else have the political powers withheld from the public, fearing,
naturally, that release of such information would only arouse the most basic
and irrepressible fears? Just as in the communication with the patient and the
family of a cancer patient, doctors do the situation no good through
withholding significant information, whether that information is positive or
negative. Unfortunately, politicians, especially those charged with national
security and state secrets are not obliged to commit to the same level of
disclosure. (And, it is true that there are situations in which public
knowledge of specific information would be more dangerous to the public good
than repression of that information. And we can only hope that those charged
with the making of such decisions to disclose or to withhold, have the kind of
maturity and sound judgement that we can trust their decisions are in the best
interests not only of the power elite, but of the public good.)

ISIS, unfortunately, does not submit to the historic
definitions of what the world has considered “warfare” in the conventional
sense. Like the many disease pandemics that are not vulnerable to antibiotics,
ISIS represents the kind of disease for which the world has not prepared, has
not anticipated, has not built defences against, and has not studied in the war
colleges. It is “asymmetrical” in the extreme. It is unpredictable in the
extreme. It is ideological, even ‘theological’ in the extreme. It is a force
that would traditionally have been dubbed a force from HELL (if there were such
a place, and such an archetype.) And yet....

Here we are some 14 years after 9/11 and twenty
years after the first attack on New York by Islamic terrorists and we all know
that there is no evident de-escalation of the impact of ISIS, or its many
iterations, and there seems to be a kind of bet going on, among the major world
powers. They are betting that they can keep the ISIS threat from exploding with
another or perhaps even several mass attacks before they can decimate the
scourge. I am not a betting man, but I would not subscribe to their fantasy.They
know more than we on the street know, yet they continue to bomb, and they continue
to subvert all ISIS’ attempts to feed itself through black market sales,
extortion, kidnapping and underground channels of money presumably via the
internet. Individuals who have adopted the ISIS dogma, or who at least seek to
appear as loyalists in the cause of Islamic terrorism, including the recent
suicide bombings in Turkey attributable to Syrian refugees, form gangs of a
few, or act solo, in their perpetration of death and destruction anywhere,
everywhere, anytime, and seemingly all the time. Yet, everyday, with every
bombing of an ISIS target, the recruitment to their ranks spikes. We are not
only not decimating ISIS, we are in fact emboldening ISIS.

Russia, also emboldened by the fog of war, for her
part, has considerably muddied the waters in Syria, purportedly in support of
Assad, and also purportedly against ISIS,and stands accused of deliberately targeting hospitals staffed and
operated by MSF (Medecins Sans Frontiers) killing innocent children, and then
denying any responsibility, while accusing the United States. There is even
some evidence that links Russia to bombs dropped in Turkey, although those
events are still to be prosecuted. And although Obama reportedly speaks on the
phone with Putin, in the middle of the night (North American time) and asks him
to change course in Sryia, and to stop deceiving the world about his desire to
destroy ISIS, he continues unabated, even virtually unchallenged, since he
knows, as the rest of us do, that Obama is not going to go to war against
Russia, either over Syria or over Ukraine. Stepping up military exercises in
the vicinity of Ukraine will not and do not threaten Putin; neither does a late
night phone call from the White House over Syria threaten Putin. He, along with
his other Middle East ally, Iran, is determined to cause havoc in the region,
undermine the west and especially the United States, and proceed to
aggrandizeboth himself (top priority)
and thereby his nation.

Unfortunately, Putin’s complicated interventions can
only elevate the temperature of the rhetoric in the presidential campaign in
the U.S. And given the pre-adolescent mentality of the American voter, some
30-37% of Republican voters in South Carolina preferring Trump, the most
bellicose and the most unpredictable and the most dangerous candidate on the
U.S. stump, there is reason, not only to be concerned about the theft of
nuclear material in Iraq, but the letting loose of the control of the Pentagon
and the nuclear buttons to a potential president like Trump. Extremes do definitely
seem to evoke extremes! That is true not only in personal arguments,
school-yard combats, political campaigns, and inevitably in macro-conflicts.

Instead of heating up both the military combat and
the supporting rhetoric, on all sides of the ISIS fight, as well as on the
potentially diplomatic agreement to cease hostilities in Syria, is it not time
for the world leaders, from all political stripes, and from all ethnicities and
linguistic and cultural backgrounds, to put their best brains to effective use
in designing a short-medium and long-term strategy to deal with terrorism, the
burgeoning flood of refugees, and the stretching of the physical, political and
ethical capacities of too many countries, and bring this scourge to a
denoument?

Prosecuting another violent war is an admission that
we have run out of other options. Prosecuting another violent war is another
episode of the control by the politicians on the right who claim to sacralise
the military, as the symbol of national security, and the symbol of military
supremacy, and of course, of the strongest democracy in history.

And yet ISIS has demonstrated that this “hymn” to
hard power is hollow, in the extreme, that it is at the core of the
international self-sabotage that haunts all conversations about what to do
about ISIS. Hard power depends on hard propaganda to perpetuate both the
loyalty of service personnel and the continuing obeisance of the politicians
and the public. The media, for its part, is merely the dispensing
pharmaceutical technician, of the mind-numbing yet desperate prayers/propaganda
of all the Ashton Carters who are charged with the military defeat of ISIS.
Every single candidate for president, from both parties, cannot afford to speak
ultimate truth to a desperate electorate who demands more military action
against ISIS, that truth being that without a complete overhaul of the thinking
that undergirds the military assaults, including the forbidden option of
removing the military from the fight, all options are not really on the table.

Desperate people, as do desperate nations, revert to
their previously ingrained habits, often habits borne of fear, and of a refusal
to admit the depth of that fear, even to admit vulnerability. Desperate parents
beat their children; and when they are confronted by those adult children on
their reasons and motives, they are mute. The confronting adult child has to
insert the only response that is feasible, “I guess you could not talk!” Of
course, talking to those who lead ISIS would be hard, even distasteful and ugly
in the extreme. And of course, it would take only back channels, out of public
view and out of public consciousness, for such talks even to begin. However, spreading
killing fields, with both the ISIS motive and the “defeat ISIS coalition”
motive can and will only lead to more killing and enhanced escalation of the
desperation on both sides. Escalating desperation, of the kind currently
demonstrated by Putin, Assad, ISIS, and even the forces now aligned to surgical
remove ISIS, will not produce the kind of ‘victory’ that Ashton Carter’s career
and historic legacy demand. They may mark time, keep up the public face of hope
that we are making progress, that we are ‘cutting off the head’ or crippling
their resources, or whatever other reporting headlines can be sold.

North Korea has nuclear weapons and threatens to
develop missiles that will carry them to the coast of North America; Iran could
easily be developing a nuclear weaspon, (even if less easily that before the
recent agreement), and should ISIS get their hands on nuclear fissionable
material, who knows what havoc they can and will create through its discharge.
Unguarded nuclear material sits ready for the persistent searching eyes and
hands of those who would profit from providing such material to thugs like
ISIS, as they would from providing chemical weapons to ISIS. We are know that
the cauldron called planet earth is less safe and far less secure that those in
power would have us believe.

The very fact that this latest report of the theft
of nuclear material has not made headlines since it was first noticed in
November is not a sign that we know who has the stuff, or that are prepared to
let the public know what kind of danger we all face, or that we really know
that we can and will defeat ISIS, not only prior to January 20, 2017, when a
new president takes the oath of office.

If we are uncertain, that is a kind of truth that
our leaders must disclose; their failure to disclose both their fear and their
uncertainty is at the heart of our real danger. And the sooner we demand a full
accounting, the sooner we will be more able to trust and thereby to commit to
whatever measures are necessary to accomplish whatever needs to be done. And
that includes talking to the dreaded beasts who control ISIS, and all the other
faces of Islamic terrorism.

*UPDATE: February 21, 2016...

Reports now indicate that the missing nuclear material has been found, and is now secured in Iraq. (From the CNN news crawl)